23 November 2010
HOLIDAY ROAD
(1973 Chevrolet Caprice Classis. Photo apparently circa 1975. Photographer unknown.)
It is a hell of a week for personal liberties and international diplomacy. In the latter case, the North Koreans are acting out again, displaying a new nuclear facility designed to produce enhanced unanium, and on the other raining down artillery and murdering ROK Marines.
When is this crap going to stop? Why do the little pricks get a free pass on criminal behavior?
Maybe this is a South Korean problem, I don’t know any more.
In the former instance, the Republic continues to descend into some fantasy land I do not recognize as America. This heavy holiday travel week we are confronted by a binary travel choice at the airport: there is either a perp pat down and personal grope (“don’t touch my junk” being the operative phrase) or being bombarded by X-rays in a scanner. Your most personal and intimate details are exposed to some minimum-wage loser behind a wall, with an unknown amount of risk from radiation, or, some other loser gets to pat the junk in person.
The authorities at TSA seem perplexed that people don’t like this. They are apparently too dim to understand that should someone not conceal explosives amid their genitals, and instead actually insert them into a body cavity as the assholes have done recently (the scanners are useless to detect that approach) this whole thing is feckless.
There is apparently a prohibition on searching the bodies of women wearing the hajib on grounds of modesty- TSA can search only from the neck up. This, as you may have suspected, is madness. The Chechen assholes have dispatched women on suicide missions.
On the altar of political correctness we have sacrificed common sense. We know exactly who is behind all of this, but the idiots who run our lives refuse to prioritize the traveling public in terms of threat. Retired federal officers, active cops, current government employees, military personnel are as subject to search as an unemployed foreign traveler.
Lunacy? You bet. It is time to seize back our common sense and our common liberty.
Simmering in my righteous juices like a holiday turkey, I turned my attention to the notebook, an object from the distant past. The narrative was of a road trip in 1975.
Before cell phones. Before the endless war against fanatical religious whack-jobs, after another war fought and lost against fanatical nationalist-commies, and in the midst of a long Cold one against the empire of the Soviets. In a recession, as now, with scary oil prices, as now, which should give some hope that all things are cyclic in nature, and that good times will come again today.
And pass away again. I left the computer and the latest surge of outrage against the future and retreated to my brown chair to look into the past.
The unknown narrator- had this been acquired by mistake at a yard sale?- was in the midst of a life-changing experience. Leaving a productive job, he seemed to be planning a Road Trip. I rejoined him as he wrote long ago on the Herreshoff-built sloop NEITH in July of 1975, thirty-five years ago:
(Sketch of the sloop NEITH’s main salon, pencil, by unknown artist, 1975.)
“I wrote off a few hundred extra on the expense account the last month and never really left my home office.”
“Moving was a drag, but a relief, too. A couple years as a lodger was more than enough for both sides, I think. Porky’s Mom liked me, and vice versa, I think, though his Dad was probably pleased to see my faded denim backside cruise out the driveway, though not for the last time, since there is still a load of crap up in the suite above the garage.”
“Then back to West Michigan for ten days. Good ones, in fact. I opened a bank account, bought new tires for the big Chevrolet Caprice Classic that used to be my old man’s company car, walked the dogs, did happy hour with Ma and Pa and Sis, and saw my brother destroy a $70 tennis racket in a drunken frenzy after a poor shot- he hit himself in the head somehow- and generally got ready to leave town again.”
“I went to the movies to see “Day of the Locust” with Mom- a great flick even if a little overblown at the end. I have to see “Rollerball” and “Nashville” now. I am not going to fork out the money for “Jaws.”
“The general plan of attack was this: Beau’s vacation was to commence the evening of July 3rd, whereupon we would effect a rendezvous somewhere with everyone’s favorite Canadian, “Bad Credit” Bobbie somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard.”
(Bad Credit Bobbie and Beau on a yacht, apparently. Photo circa 1975. Photographer unknown.)
“Bobbie was currently on an involuntary sabbatical from the International Grenfell Foundation of greater Goose Bay, Labrador. The Foundation is, as I understand it, the front line unit in the Canadian Government’s crusade to make the Indians take showers and shit inside.”
“I think my Aunt Rhonda worked for them in the thirties- she was a public health nurse and a bit of a crank like the rest of us but I am not sure.”
“The problem was that although the Government had provided pre-fabricated housing at the traditional village site on the river, the Indians moved into the settlement in the savage winter to live in tents adjacent to the liquor store in the settlement. The whole thing was too complicated to really understand until I went up there, and the first Indian I met in the parking lot of the little airport started to go through the pockets of my parka but that is another story.”
“Anyhow, Bobbie had been stripped of his US residency by an eager beaver Border Control Officer on one of his trips to see his folks in Toronto. Something about one of those routine questions: like, “Are you currently looking for work in the US, and Bobbie said, “I don’t know,” and the guy ripped up his Green Card on the spot. So, he had abruptly been thrown into the role of being a Canadian for real. It was startling, and in resentment, he became something of a nationalist, which is sort of an oxymoron about Canucks. The whole thing is too sordid for words, but that is what was going on. He had been subject to the Draft and everything while he was here, so it was sort of weird. He could come back, of course, but he couldn’t stay.”
“Strange to like suddenly not be a Detroiter even though he had lived here all of his life.”
“So, he walked into Northwest River after securing a government job that no one else wanted in a place where the Indians were supposed to live and didn’t want to and had to straighten out some folks on a few key points. In the process, apparently some noses got out of joint at the Mission, and he ran up a couple hundred dollars in calls back to the States, and the Mission in turn had to clear up a few key points with Bobbie, like where the door was, and he was at liberty again.”
“I guess it was for the best. The place sounded like a dump: the Beer Boat only came in once a year with the annual supply of Molson’s, which then sat in the warehouse until the next September getting skunked. The price apparently did not decay like the beer in the warehouse at the Hudson’s Bay Store, and Bobbie declared that you had to buy six just to get three or four good ones.”
“It was a crazy place, there in the pine trees. The Northwest Mounted Police went up to Northwest River from the operating base in Goose Bay four days a week- you can guess which ones- to keep order.”
“Bobbie got to go seal hunting in the Arctic, so the whole thing was high on the horror-meter, and of course he got screwed on his back pay so he was broke again pretty quickly. No one gets broke like Bobbie. Back in college, his creditors numbered in the dozens. Some credit card outfits took a few hundred in losses before the pink-edged threats started to roll into our communal house on East University Street in Ann Arbor.”
“They are rolling in yet, I imagine, and so there must have been an upside to losing de facto citizenship, since he could thumb his Canadian nose at his American creditors with virtual immunity.”
“It turned out it didn’t matter much.”
“A flurry of cross-country phone calls brought an evolving series of plans. In one variation, I would drive to the family reunion in Rochester, New York, picking up Bobbie in Toronto, then drive on to Camden to pick up Beau. No, that won’t work; maybe if I pick up Bobbie, no that won’t work, since he has no interest in my family reunion…shoot. I guess the answer is just to drive, and see how it turns out.”
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
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